In this three-part series, Jeffrey L. Buller explores how colleges and universities can encourage substantive research without detracting from excellence in teaching. Parts 1 and 2 considered how the ways in which faculty roles are defined, evaluated, and rewarded contribute to a false impression that teaching and research are distinct activities.

In this three-part series, Jeffrey L. Buller explores how colleges and universities can encourage substantive research without detracting from excellence in teaching. Part 1, which appeared [Tuesday,] discussed the ways in which the traditional division of faculty responsibilities into teaching, research, and service creates an inherent expectation that these activities are distinct.

It’s an issue many colleges and universities are facing today: How do you expand research capacity while still preserving an institution’s traditional emphasis on effective teaching? How is it possible to improve your reputation in one of these areas without abandoning your reputation in the other? How can you expand your mission in an environment of increasingly strained budgets, greater competition among institutions (including public, private, for-profit, and virtual universities), and rigorous accountability? And how do you balance the expectation of so many legislatures and governing boards that you demonstrate student success with their simultaneous expectation that you obtain more and more external funding from sponsored research and the frequent pursuit of grants?

At the start of a new position, it’s natural to wonder how many new initiatives you should get under way quickly and which are better left for the future. There are, after all, two conflicting principles at work:

Handling complaints is one of the defining roles of academic administration. It demands perseverance, good listening skills, tact, and adherence to institutional policies and legal requirements. In an interview with Academic Leader, C.K. Gunsalus, author of The Academic Administrator’s Survival Guide (which includes an entire chapter on complaints), offered advice on how to manage this important role.

With the spate of books and articles that deal with the issue of incivility in higher education, it’s easy to conclude that destructive disharmony is the single biggest problem facing colleges and universities today. To be sure, lack of collegiality has become a significant challenge, and nearly every academic leader can recall at least one department or college that became increasingly dysfunctional because of its inability to work together in a mutually supportive manner. But the great deal of attention we pay to the challenges of incivility can cause us to underestimate the dangers of an opposing threat that also exists in many academic units: groupthink.

Institutions are beginning to create jobs that recognize by name the importance of student engagement in and out of the classroom. These positions are based on the idea that students who contribute actively to their learning environments—through experiences such as learning communities, service-learning, first-year seminars, and undergraduate research—are more likely to succeed in college.

There are many reasons for wishing to increase the diversity of your faculty. They include improving recruitment and retention, raising student engagement, increasing innovation, building stronger communities and helping to prepare tomorrow’s leaders and citizens.

As an academic leader, each decision you make has the potential to have a lasting impact within your unit and beyond. Competing viewpoints, priorities and strong personalities contribute to the difficulty many leaders have with making decisions.